Building an Edge Server with Intel NUC

After a long time, one device that excited me the most is the custom Edge Server that I assembled. It’s a DIY Intel NUC kit powered by a Dual Core i5 processor, 32GB DDR4 RAM, 500 GB SSD + 500GB M.2 SSD. This powerhouse is only twice the size of a Raspberry Pi but acts as a local endpoint for IoT devices. It is configured with Ethernet, WiFi, BLE, ZigBee, Z-Wave, and Thread protocols.

Since it emulates the public cloud functionality it runs the following stack –

SurgeMQ as a MQTT Broker

Apache Kafka as the ingestion endpoint

PipelineDB for stream analytics

Apache NiFi as the complex rules engine

Node-Red for simple routing

Apache OpenWhisk for Serverless Computing

Minio as the Object Storage endpoint

TensorFlow for Predictive Analytics and ML

Grafana as the dashboard

All the above are deployed as containers running in a Kubernetes cluster on top of Ubuntu 64 bit. The stack can selectively switch to Azure, AWS, Bluemix, or GCP. The appliance can also run Azure IoT Gateway.

I will be shortly adding an external Nvidia GPU for CUDA.

I will publish the details of the setup when I am done. The entire setup and the use case will be demoed at an Edge Computing workshop that I am running in May.

Janakiram MSV heads the Cloud Infrastructure Services at Aditi Technologies. He was the founder and CTO of Get Cloud Ready Consulting, a niche Cloud Migration and Cloud Operations firm that recently got acquired by Aditi Technologies. In his current role, he leads a highly talented engineering team that focuses on migrating and managing applications deployed on Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Windows Azure Infrastructure Services.
Janakiram is an industry analyst with deep understanding of Cloud services. Through his speaking, writing and analysis, he helps businesses take advantage of the emerging technologies. He leverages his experience of engaging with the industry in developing informative and practical research, analysis and authoritative content to inform, influence and guide decision makers. He analyzes market trends, new products / features, announcements, industry happenings and the impact of executive transitions.
Janakiram is one of the first few Microsoft Certified Professionals on Windows Azure in India. Demystifying The Cloud, an eBook authored by Janakiram is downloaded more than 100,000 times within the first few months. He is the Chief Editor of a popular portal on Cloud called www.CloudStory.in that covers the latest trends in Cloud Computing. Janakiram is an analyst with the GigaOM Pro analyst network where he analyzes the Cloud Services landscape. He is a guest faculty at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad (IIIT-H) where he teaches Big Data and Cloud Computing to students enrolled for the Masters course. As a passionate speaker, he has chaired the Cloud Computing track at premier events in India.
He has been the keynote speaker at many premier conferences, and his seminars are attended by thousands of architects, developers and IT professionals. His sessions are rated among the best in every conference he participates.
Janakiram has worked at the world-class product companies including Microsoft Corporation, Amazon Web Services and Alcatel-Lucent. Joining as the first employee of Amazon Web Services in India, he was the AWS Technology Evangelist. Prior to that, Janakiram spent 10 years at Microsoft Corporation where he was involved in selling, marketing and evangelizing the Microsoft Application Platform and Tools.